


The Mystery of Gallateon's Hoard

by iimpavid



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Aliases, Case Fic, Eldritch Objects, Extortion, Gen, M/M, Peter Has Feelings, a hint of space pirates, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 02:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16924419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: In which Peter Nureyev takes a job he doesn't strictly need.





	The Mystery of Gallateon's Hoard

Peter blinks awake to the sound of rain, a soft cascade against the hotel window, and the hum of Hyperion City Uptown hover traffic. The scent of bourbon and blood and dust lingers on the pillow that had been tucked into his arms. He remembered: The whine of regen working on his broken knuckles while Juno was trundled through triage. Walking hand-in-hand under neon. Washing the antiseptic smell of hospital from Juno's skin. Falling asleep holding Juno-- not a pillow.

He has slept alone often across dozens of lives and dozens of planets but he has never woken up cold. Peter sat up, the immaculate brocade duvet bundled against his chest to fight off the goosebumps of a grey Martian morning. The only clothes trailing from door to bed-- in no particular order, he and Juno were, in a word, preoccupied-- were his. He grabbed his glasses from the bedside table and dressed in piecemeal. The thermostat needed to be reset. He called the front desk and instead of asking for maintenance requested the kitchen.

He tipped room service for the coffee he could have left the room to buy if he felt human enough for basic interaction and that proved a mistake. The look the concierge gave him was inscrutable with just an ounce of pity and he found himself bereft of any blithe response to it. Peter's lip curled--

His comms went off.

He reached to set his coffee on the dresser. He released it six inches too soon, rushing to the bedside table. It would chime no more than five times before cutting to the voicemail that he had never set up-- this was a burner unit, not meant to last more than a week--

He answered it on the final ring, breathless, "Please tell me you've gone to find breakfast, darling, that’s the only way I’ll forgive you for letting me wake up in the cold. I'm positively famished."

"Well, hello to you, too, Elias," came the answering purr, "I didn't think you'd missed me that much."

"How did you get this number?" In a single terrified heartbeat, he remembered Elias Hunter-- inventor, historian, gold digger in all senses of the word-- and slipped into him.

Ambrose Uriani tsked and Peter could see the Neptunian in his mind's eye, rolling all six of his eyes at what was clearly an inane question. "Don't you remember what I told you the last time you left?"

"How could I forget?” It seemed he was indeed too valuable to be lost. Or allowed to escape. He swallowed. He would have to try harder this time. “What do you need, Ambrose? I'm afraid I don't have a great deal of time--"

"Your friend Juno on their way back so soon?"

"Ah-- not quite, no, he’s-- I have a flight to catch, you see. It leaves in," he checked his watch, the first old Earth artifact he'd ever kept, and his eyes widened in shock, "Oh. Less than an hour, oh my."

"What's the flight number? I'll get you a connection to Triton Imperial. I need you, Elias."

"Why ever would I want to go to Triton when there is a resort on subtropical Risa IV waiting to welcome me?"

"Don't know. You interested in Galateon's Hoard?"

He laughed, brittle and bright, "Space pirates, really? If Galateon ever had any kind of treasure trove, Ambrose, I doubt it survived him in a place like the Halimede system."

"He did and so did the treasure."

"How?"

"Now you're curious, aren't you, Eli?"

"Professional curiosity. I have a flight to catch in 45 minutes, Ambrose, and my hotel is not near to the spaceport." He had hoped they would make a leisurely morning of walking through Hyperion City one last time, en route to the galaxy.

"Galateon was an enigma hobbyist; he left maps, codes, that kind of junk. It's not hard to follow but the hoard is, in a word, impregnable. It needs a real light touch. Your touch. You've got the right kind of crazy and genius for a job like this, Eli, I need you for it."

"Oh, well, when you put it like that," Peter wiped the last of his fingerprints from the hotel room with a handkerchief while with calculated grace Elias Hunter flushed with delight. "I suppose I could suffer the cold for a little while, just for you."

* * *

 

The interior of the Uriani Institute was all Old World aesthetics-- brutal lines in metal and glass, high ceilings that amplified sounds in crowded rooms to unholy decibels, an outrageous number of windows that stared out into the vast depths of Triton's seas. Knowing that it extended nearly a mile below Triton's surface, into the endless black expanse of frigid and unexplored ocean, made it feel all the more claustrophobic. Gave it a sense of dim that no number of UV lights running through the ceilings could abate.

"It's not like you to be so underdressed, Elias," Ambrose told him in lieu of welcoming him into his office.

The Neptunian was a hulking mass of soft luminescence and multi-armed membrane that concealed a great deal of physical strength. Ambrose always dressed impeccably and expected the same of all his employees. Even his security staff wore designer uniforms.

"Well, I left my previous engagement in something of a hurry. I'm afraid I didn't have time to pack much." Come to think of it, he couldn't remember where his luggage had turned up. Probably lost to the sands of Mars for some explorer in the far-flung future to drool over.

"How in the stars did you get fired from the University of Mars and run off the planet in the same day?"

"Let's just say that some of my theories on ancient Martian reproduction were controversial among the senior faculty of my department. The students, however, were quite fond of them." It had the desired effect: The giant Neptunian laughed at the salacious implications and finally sat down. Peter was not used to looking up to other people. He draped himself across the leather-upholstered club chair across from Ambrose. "But that's enough about me. Tell me about Gallateon's Hoard, Ambrose. If you truly have found it-- you'll go down in history."

"And here I expected you to start harping on how I found you again."

"Oh, that's not news to me."

"No?"

"Of course not. It's horribly straightforward and I have to appreciate your being a man of your word, Ambrose." The bluff curdled his stomach but he delivered it seamlessly, bright-eyed and comfortable, "It's something of a comfort to know I can't find myself alone in the vastness of the universe. Poetic, even. And very good money."

Miracle of miracles, Ambrose bought it. It rankled him-- Peter could see the irritation in the shifting of his luminescence. He did not like thinking that his prey was merely humoring him.

"You're too clever for your own good, Elias, my boy."

Peter grinned. He wasn't. There was no such thing as being too clever, too informed, too prepared, too skilled. Whenever he thinks he's finally gotten close to enough something crops up to prove him wrong. Something like Ambrose Uriani. His reality check for the last 20 years.

"Have you ever been to Halimede-beta?"

The non-sequitur made him cock his head, "I can't say that I have."

"We'll have to get you vaccinated. The Hoard's in their polar rainforest. Last thing I need is you dying of scarvil worms before you get it out of there."

"You've not seen it yet?" Half a dozen escape routes from this plan unfolded themselves behind his eyes.

"We have. From above. There's some local team excavating the site already."

Peter's stomach twisted. Ambrose looked far too delighted by that fact. "You mean to kill them."

"And let all their hard work go to waste? Of course not! The security protocols are the stuff of pulp novels, booby traps like you can't believe, and only half of it outlined in Gallateon's personal effects. Someone's gotta get through 'em and letting the Hallimedans do it doesn't screw my bottom line."

"If you're so set on using archaeologists as canon fodder, old friend, I don't see what you need me for. Wait long enough. They'll get you in there with the sheer power of human persistence."

"They can get me to the Hoard, but no one can get into it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Ambrose sat forward, extended a hand over the glass tabletop and pulled from it a series of photographs. They were old files, corrupted and patchy. What Peter could infer from them was a slow disaster in sequence: grave robbers with astounding luck to make it through the lush polar valley and find the heart of Gallateon's Hoard. The thing itself was a fractured smear of pixels.

"I'm afraid I'm struggling to keep up, Ambrose; where do I fit into your acquiring this... unknowable object that Gallateon so valued?"

"According to what's been left behind, it's more or less a safe. You can still crack a safe, can't you?"

* * *

 

It is... difficult not to be disappointed that the Uriani research/heist team does not stay on Halimede-beta. The location of Galateon’s Hoard had required a great deal of jungle trekking, no small amount of deforestation once they arrived, and a disappointing loss of lackey lives. The vault had proven disappointingly small once they had circumvented a great deal of natural and fabricated horrors meant to guard it. A monolithic safe large enough for a full-grown Neptunian to stand in, possibly even two of them back-to-back, carved across its whole with designs. Some of them, he recognized from Martian ruins. Others, from books about Old Earth. Others still were unidentifiable and made his head throb to look at them too long.

Of course the safe, while intimidatingly large, (if it was a safe; it bore no resemblance to one outside its shape and initial scans could not determine whether it was solid or even had an opening mechanism) but still small enough to be moved off-world. This quickly became necessary when the Halimedean Interplanetary Police caught up with them.

Elias cursed Interpol for the thousandth time as his space heater crackled, snapped, and gave up the ghost.

It was one thing to traipse around the jungles of Lamidh-Centir swathed in the finest nano-netting on the market and bathing in strong, spiced oils that repelled all kinds of parasites. Shuffling around the frozen dark of Neptune’s most-populous moon— so cold that even in the below-ice compound cities human breath came in ghostly clouds— in a thermoconductive bodysuit beneath layers of thermal fleece, sweaters, and fur while trying to conduct the delicate business of safecracking was another matter entirely.

To make matters worse, the work of solving the galaxy’s most-frustrating puzzle box was too delicate to allow him gloves. The work of casting keys was far too delicate. And Peter had to accept some responsibility for that particular inconvenience, though: he refused out of hand to keep notes on a tablet— digital space was too easy to break into. On a planet composed entirely of water and ice it was easy to dispose of his handwritten notes. All evidence of his involvement with Ambrose Uriani could simply disappear when the need arose.

“I made you coffee,” Pippa Imaldi greeted him as he made his way into their ad-hoc research lab. She was a slight human whose penchant for dying her hair fluorescent colors had turned disastrous some five years ago. She handled baldness with aplomb and supplemented her aesthetics with a variety of wigs more colorful and varied in style than her natural hair could have ever hoped to be. They had the added benefit of being immediately removable should she need to enter a sterile environment. Today's wig hung in a short, severe bob and was patterned with screaming yellow chevrons.

“You are a lifesaver, my dear,” he drawled affectionately, pouring a cup that was far, far too small. “Has the newest shipment of ossified arconid arrived?”

“Not yet. Sounds like a solar flare out of the Halimede system delayed our runner on their way out. I don’t see why they couldn’t just bring it directly from Mars.”

“Security concerns, if I were to wager a guess.” Ambrose’s tendency toward paranoia was vital to his continued success in business but Elias was impatient with it.

The mechanisms which opened Galateon’s Hoard, whatever it might contain, had proven deceptively simple. Interlaced locks and layers like a puzzle box that was, so far, eight-deep. Each one had required a different material key or involved careful sequencing of bioelectronic tumblers. He was certain that the ninth had to be the last. He was working so deep within the “safe” that there were, perhaps, only three feet of “solid” crystal left. Its solidity was variable. It seemed to hum and shift even when perfectly still.

It stood in the center of their workshop and taunted him. It contained no normal riches and that certainty belay even greater wealth.

No wonder it had caught Ambrose's interest. Peter himself was starting to become genuinely curious.

The ninth key— the last key—had to be carved from ossified arconid. According to Pippa (he would be lost, utterly bereft of hope without her gemological expertise), its molecular structures were the closest match to those implied in the cast they’d made and so it had fallen to Ambrose Uriani to acquire as much of the rare, poisonous metalloid as possible. The delivery they awaited would provide the most-valuable thing Elias could imagine: insurance. Spare materials that would allow for mistakes and, if necessary, surreptitious duplication of the key.

Pippa patted his shoulder in sympathy. “Just wait ‘til you hear the best part.”

He raised his eyebrow. “The boss went for the easiest chunk of ossified arconid he could get his hands on, right? Well, you’re never gonna guess who it belonged to.”

The pause drew out into an awkward silence before he obliged her, “The Saffron Prince? Pilate Perrera?”

“You have a thing for Mars, don’t you? No, it was Marjorie Otorick’s. Her dead wife’s actually.”

“Am I supposed to recognize that name?”

“Do you ever watch the news?”

“Not unless I’m in it.”

“The Ostorick’s own… pretty much every Risa luxury resort in existence.” 

This didn't impress him nearly as much as Pippa hoped it would.

“I see.” 

“ _Anyway._ She’s mad as hell because somebody’s desecrated her wife’s grave-- even though nobody ever touched the corpse or left a single footprint behind. We went out of our way to make sure we didn’t, we’re not amateurs-- and she’s gone and hired somebody to bring her fancy funeral jewelry back. I mean, it’s not Interpol but _they_ have rules to follow. This guy, I heard, doesn’t.”

“You certainly know how to bury the lede, Pippa. Who is this mercenary?”

“If he was a merc the boss woulda bought him out. Nobody knows who he is and Ostorick's not talking. He’s harder to track than you are.”

* * *

 

A week later, the shipment arrives. It's early afternoon and Elias insists that they retrieve the ossified arconid personally. The walk through the Uriani Institute's many subaquatic floors to the shipping department is long and Pippa is glad, so glad that she wore sensible shoes. Elias, meanwhile, must have been out of his mind. She only ever saw him out of his dizzyingly tall heels when he had to work on the Hoard's key, where security and safety demanded he change into a pair of loafers. "Where'd you get those shoes, anyway? They're pretty."

This pair has a look like polished malatium; striated greens and platinum, neither of them materials that a person should make shoes out of let alone choose to wear. They're polished to a mirror-shine and produce a metallic ringing sound instead of a _click_ as he walks. Pippa is in awe of the fact that neither his silk tights nor his feet have been shredded by the metals.

"Oh, these old things? I just picked them up on the Outer Rim, that's all--

Suddenly, Elias catches the eye of a passing security guard and forgets a lifetime of practice walking and trips over his own feet. It's a sequence of long-limbed flailing before Pippa can get a hold of his arm and help steady him. A passing cohort of guards stops to stare.

"Oh my god, are you alright?"

"Yes! Yes, of course I am." He looked straight at her as if he'd done it on purpose, not a single glance spared to those who'd been just as startled by his sudden struggle with gravity.

Pippa believes that about as much as she believes in the human capacity to harness dark matter to produce energy: not at all. "Have you been getting enough sleep?" _Clumsy_ is not a word she would use to describe her research partner. She reaches up to feel his forehead with the back of one freezing hand. He looks like he's seen a ghost. "Don't tell me you've been skipping the decontamination protocols?"

"I would never," he rolled his eyes and pulled away from her. He adjusted his coat collar-- no doubt a significant portion of the galaxy's endangered Plutonian ruff-maned minks had died to make the ankle-length, silk-lined luxury and it just barely kept out the pervasive chill of Triton-- "I just tripped, Pippa. Come along, now, I don't want to miss the courier. This will all be a terrible waste of the widow Ostorick's time if we do."

He fell back into that perfect catwalk stride of his as if nothing had interrupted him in the first place. 

**Author's Note:**

> This may or may not become something longer-- time will tell. In the meantime, please give me that sweet, sweet external validation through comments.


End file.
